Oracle pulls Taleo Universal Profile feature

28 February 2015

Taleo is a HRM recruiting solution used by most American enterprises. Some years ago, prior to their being acquired by Oracle, Taleo offered a tremendously helpful Universal Profile feature, also branded as UP or Talent Exchange. The idea being, since so many enterprises are using the same online application system, asking mostly the same questions, why shouldn’t applicants be able to enter their data once and then import it into each company they apply to?

Citing competition from LinkedIn and Indeed (the latter being laughable, seeing as it has fewer resume features than established players like Dice or Monster), Oracle took the Universal Profile feature offline in June 2014.

Talent Exchange started as an interesting value proposition enabling candidates to have a single Universal Profile to apply to jobs at any Taleo customer career section. Over the years, however, candidates have increasingly preferred to use LinkedIn, Indeed and other consumer facing sites to maintain their resumes and profiles. An analysis by Oracle Taleo showed that use of the Talent Exchange as a sourcing tool was extremely low among recruiter and sourcer audiences. Consequently, the time has come to retire this solution.

If use of the Universal Profile was low, it was because Taleo did not pre-configure the feature to be on by default. Few companies had any idea they had a powerful solution to increase applications by decreasing applicant frustration. And while newer versions of Taleo do support LinkedIn imports, the field mapping is less accurate than Universal Profile, and Oracle is making the same mistake by not enabling LinkedIn imports by default. While I’m not familiar with the exact configuration process, I’m sure it involves going out and getting a company-specific LinkedIn API key, something the HRM professionals that are often left to configure the solution are unlikely to successfully follow through on.